Why Your Confluence Search Needs an Upgrade

An improved search experience can bring your work with Confluence and your productivity to the next level. A plugin can provide the solution.

Many organizations use software like Atlassian Confluence to manage their data and information assets. They use it as an enterprise wiki and a company-wide intranet to promote company-wide learning, teamwork and collaboration.

Although Confluence is undoubtedly a fine solution, its search functionality can often seem pretty cumbersome and frustrating to the average user. This issue seems not limited to solutions like Confluence and their specific functions, but rather represents a general trend. Various studies suggest that knowledge workers in organizations spend between two and three hours per day searching for information.1

Confluence Search: Features that Need Improvement

From the perspective of an average user, the following features of Confluence need to become better to make the search experience enjoyable, seamless and productive:

• Classic keyword search. With the standard Confluence search, it is possible to search documents by keywords and to sort the results by date and last change. This can be sufficient when searching smaller volumes of data but becomes a problem with larger volumes. Also, the absence of AI functionality and no support for advanced linguistics leads to poor accuracy of results.
• Scope of other search functions. The normal Confluence search supports only rudimentary functions. Features like autocomplete, spelling correction or document preview are not included.
• Attachment search. Confluence lets you search for attachments in standard formats, such as .docx, .txt, .xml, .ppt, .xls, .pdf or .html. However, other formats like .xlsx or .pptx are not supported. Additionally, only attachments with a maximum size of 100 MB are indexed.
• Absence of an integrated enterprise search. Many organizations today store data, documents and information not only in Confluence but in several other locations. For example, they use solutions like Jira, SharePoint, CRM-Systems or Google Drive. The search capabilities of Confluence don’t provide access to these sources.

Additionally, in day-to-day practice, users that search with Confluence mostly look at the first five or so results. Especially digital natives among the staff are used to searching quickly and easily. If the search doesn’t yield acceptable matches, they just give up.

Poor Use of Intranet and Other Resources

As a result, the use of the intranet in the organization often declines over time. There is even a danger that the investment in Confluence – its development, maintenance and user licenses – will not pay off or this will take much longer.

Confluence Advanced Search: Suitable only for a Minority of Users

One could certainly argue that Confluence has advanced search capabilities that can significantly improve the search results. However, it is often ignored that only about 5 percent of the involved employees are familiar with these advanced functions of the search. The rest of the users is only able to draw on their Google experience, which they consciously or unconsciously transfer onto the professional setting. And this is a recipe for disappointment and frustration.

This means that in order to be accessible and of the best possible value to employees, intranet and wiki-solutions should not only provide advanced search functionality but be easy and intuitive to use. To be productive, employees need to find information quickly, whether this be company memos, press releases, annual reports or other information.

iFinder Confluence Search Provides the Solution

The problems discussed above could be easily solved by a specific Confluence integration solution: One that provides powerful, efficient search capabilities, is simple to operate and includes a modern, user-friendly interface. Such a solution will enable you to find the information or a specific document you are looking for quickly and easily. Here the iFinder – a powerful search tool offered by IntraFind – comes in. It is able to find the prodigious needle in the haystack. The solution incorporates latest technological achievements and provides modern features. In particular:

• An AI-powered full text search
• A capability to find more than 600 file formats in Confluence and other data repositories.
• An ability to search and preview the information.
• An access through the Confluence search interface to many other data sources in the organization. This will enable you to find and access organizational data that is stored elsewhere: in SharePoint, Google Drive, social media posts, audio and video files or data stored on fileshare.
• Access to advanced search functions like autocomplete, synonyms-suggestion, secure search, tab-based search structure (allows multiple searches at the same time).
• A Personalized Dashboard (prepares and presents recent searches, saved searches and favored documents).

In this way, iFinder helps you to improve your ROI of Confluence significantly. Moreover, the enriched user experience due to a convenient, efficient and effective search will likely favorably impact the adoption rates of Confluence in your organization. Thus, your employees can become more productive by spending less time on unnecessary searches. In this way, Confluence could become a central go-to system for knowledge management and collaboration in your organization.

Conclusion

By investing in your Confluence solution, you already made a great decision. For this investment to pay off optimally, you need a sophisticated and, at the same time, easy-to-use search solution. iFinder can help you to achieve this objective. By this, you will be able to justify the investment before respective stakeholders, and greatly facilitate the adoption of Confluence by the average user.

Sources

(1) https://www.articlecube.com/research-shows-searching-information-work-wastes-time-and-money

(2) Picture by Daniel Lerman from Unsplash